Israel war on Gaza updates: Strike on Gaza school kills eight

Thank you for joining us for updates on everything related to Israel’s war on Gaza.

For more on why Israel has launched its largest operation on the West Bank in decades, go here.

Read Noor Alyacoubi’s dispatch from Gaza City about Ezzeddin Lulu, a young doctor who has established a foundation to provide training and financial support for medical students in the war-torn enclave.

Also, read our story on the Biden administration’s latest sanctions on Israeli settlers here.

And you can find all our latest coverage of Israel’s war on Gaza here.

We will be closing the live blog shortly, but before we do, here’s a recap of the day’s main events:

• Israel launched the largest assault on the occupied West Bank in years, with hundreds of soldiers carrying out raids in which at least 11 Palestinians were killed and many wounded.
• Doctors Without Borders (MSF) says that about 650 patients were forced to leave Al-Aqsa Hospital in Gaza after Israel placed the facility under evacuation orders.
• World Food Programme said it was pausing movements within Gaza after a UN humanitarian aid convoy came under fire by Israeli forces.
• The US issued sanctions against Israeli settlers amid surging settler attacks and land theft against Palestinians in the occupied West Bank.

The Palestinian Wafa news agency is reporting that at least three people were wounded during Israeli forces’ raid on the Far’a refugee camp in the occupied West Bank.

One person was wounded by shrapnel from gunfire while the other two were injured in physical attacks by the Israeli forces, according to the Palestinian Red Crescent Society.

The humanitarian aid supply in Gaza is likely at its lowest point since November, says UNRWA’s Director of Planning Sam Rose, estimating that some 100 trucks are getting into the enclave per day.

“That compares to about 300 per day before the Rafah operation started in May, and way below the 500 trucks that we have insisted are the requirements to meet the minimum humanitarian needs of the population,” Rose told Al Jazeera.

Palestinian university students in the occupied West Bank live under the constant threat of arrest by the Israeli military, often without trial or charges.

At Birzeit University, a centre of Palestinian intellectual life, a staff member who documents those arrests explains the challenges that the best and brightest Palestinian students often face and the obstacles they create for their futures.

Listen to Al Jazeera’s The Take podcast below.

Qaid Farhan al-Kadi, an Israeli man who was abducted by Hamas on October 7 and held in Gaza until he was recovered earlier this week, has returned to his home and called on the Israeli government to reach a deal for the release of the remaining captives.

“It does not matter if they are Arab or Jewish, all have a family waiting for them. They also want to feel the joy,” he told reporters in his home village of Khirbet Karkur. “I told Netanyahu yesterday, ‘work to have an end to this’.”

The 52-year-old is one of Israel’s about 300,000 Arab Bedouins, a group that has long faced discrimination from the Israeli state.

The Associated Press reported that Khirbet Karkur, an unincorporated Bedouin village, is currently under demolition orders by the government.

Since November, 70 percent of residents have received notifications that their homes will be demolished on the grounds that they were constructed without permits, which Israeli authorities rarely grant to the group. About one-third of Bedouin Arabs live in communities and villages that the Israeli government considers illegal.

Israeli soldiers and bulldozers stormed the Jenin refugee camp accompanied by drones and fighter jets.

It was described as the biggest military assault on the occupied West Bank in more than two decades. The raids also took place in Tulkarem and Tubas, with aerial strikes adding to the number of casualties.

Medical teams were finding it difficult to tend to the wounded.

Israel says its main target is Palestinian fighters in four refugee camps. The military says that the armed groups are planning attacks against Israeli targets and are getting better at making improvised explosive devices (IEDs).

For Palestinians, these groups are part of resisting Israel’s decades-long occupation.

Many families of Israeli captives have set out on a march from Tel Aviv towards an area near the security fence with Gaza to demand a prisoner exchange deal.

Shira Albag, the mother of one of the female soldiers held in the Strip, said history would care more about how the country manages the safe return of captives than whether Israel occupied the Philadelphi Corridor.

Her comments come after another round of ceasefire talks in Cairo on Sunday failed to yield any results as Hamas rejected new conditions put forward by Israel.

Key sticking points in the talks include an Israeli presence in the Philadelphi Corridor, a narrow 14.5km (9-mile) stretch of land along Gaza’s southern border with Egypt.

In Cairo, the Hamas delegation demanded that Israel be bound by what was agreed upon on July 2, following a plan laid out by Biden and a UNSC resolution.

Earlier on Wednesday, Israel’s military said it destroyed a 3km-long (1.9-mile-long) tunnel near the Netzarim Corridor, which it set up to split northern Gaza from the south.

Members of the military’s Yahalom engineering unit worked with soldiers in the Jerusalem brigade to locate, probe and wreck the tunnel, the military said, sharing footage claiming to show its destruction.

The tunnel is among hundreds of pieces of military infrastructure destroyed in recent weeks, the Israeli army claimed.

Palestinian officials have warned of “dire and dangerous” consequences as hundreds of Israeli forces fan out across the occupied West Bank during a time of mounting tensions.

What does the Israeli assault, the largest in nearly two decades, hope to accomplish?

What can its timing tell us about other events in the region? And what do analysts expect to see next?

You can read more about the Israeli raids here.

A journalist and his sister are among at least 51 people killed in Israeli air raids across Gaza since dawn on Wednesday.

Journalist Mohammed Abd Rabbuh and his sister were killed when his sister’s home in Nuseirat refugee camp was targeted.

Yemen’s Houthi group has said it will allow tug boats and rescue ships to assist the crude oil tanker Sounion in the Red Sea, after the vessel was damaged by projectiles fired from the coast of Yemen last week.

“Several countries have reached out to ask Ansar Allah [Houthis], requesting a temporary truce for the entry of tugboats and rescue ships into the incident area,” Iran’s mission to the UN said.

“In consideration of humanitarian and environmental concerns, Ansar Allah has consented to this request.”

The Palestinian news agency Wafa reports that an Israeli sniper has shot and killed a 62-year-old disabled Palestinian man named Ayed Abu al-Hayja during an Israeli raid on Tulkarem in the occupied West Bank.

Quoting local sources, Wafa reported that al-Hayja was killed in his home in the Nur Shams refugee camp during the Israeli incursion and was discovered by family members who went to check on him and found al-Hayja covered in blood.

Ambulance crews have been unable to reach the home as Israeli forces impose closures on the camp as they carry out operations.

The UN’s World Food Programme (WFP) says it is suspending humanitarian operations in Gaza after Israeli forces opened fire on a “clearly marked” UN aid convoy.

The WFP said in a statement that the aid vehicles had received “multiple clearances by Israeli authorities to approach” a checkpoint before Israeli forces opened fire, striking a vehicle 10 times.

Israel has opened fire on humanitarian workers throughout the course of its war in Gaza.

After Israeli forces issued evacuation orders affecting Al-Aqsa Hospital in Gaza, smaller health facilities, already strained, are being pushed far beyond their limits as they attempt to absorb displaced patients.

“Judging from what we’re seeing, the hospital has been pushed to operate beyond its capacity,” said Al Jazeera’s Hani Mahmoud, reporting from al-Awda Hospital in Gaza.

“We’re looking at 30 times more than its capacity,” he added, noting that a large number of people are waiting in line for assistance at the registration desk.